1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to increasing the reliability of electronic devices, and more specifically to increasing the reliability of electronic devices by utilizing one or more expert systems.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Any applications for electronics can benefit from an increase in reliability. But some applications for electronics especially need an increase in reliability, such as when human safety is concerned. People at locations (e.g., buildings, tunnels, bridges, factories, refineries, hospitals, ski slopes, public transportation vehicles, such as buses, subways, trains, planes, and ships, and other large structures) in emergency situations needlessly continue to suffer many thousands of deaths and injuries each year around the world. Although electronic devices have been devised that alert people at a location by an alarm to an unsafe condition (e.g., fire, combustion gases such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and so forth), people have generally been forced to rely on the reliability of critical electronic devices in determining whether a threat to human safety exists and what their safest course of action would be.
Such failures, particularly in relatively risky locations, such as in airplanes, high speed vehicles, battlefields, hostile environments (e.g., high temperature environments, poisonous environments, high radiation environments, and equivalents), tunnels, bridges, factories, refineries, hospitals, or public transportation vehicles (such as buses, subways, trains, airplanes, ships, and equivalents), may require extremely prompt and reliable operation of electronic devices and fast choices by people in determining their safest course of action in an emergency situation, such as a fire, collision, explosion, violent attack, gas release, flooding, avalanche, lightning, hurricane, tornado, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, medical emergency, or other unexpected emergency. There may not be enough time for people to determine whether or not a critical electronic device is actually reliable and correct in an assessment of a situation. Failures of critical electronic devices are more likely to be fatal in dangerous locations and situations, so the need for obtaining a correct output is even greater.
U.S. Pat. App. No. 2007019422 published by Nathan, et al., on Aug. 23, 2007, discloses a method and system for a building warning system. The building safe warn generally related to warning or otherwise alerting people to hazards or other conditions in the building. The warnings may be generated as a function of the position of the person in the building and/or the location of a hazard so as to facilitate safely evacuating people from the building. The location of the people may be reported to emergency response entities to facilitate person discovery and rescue. The disclosures of this patent application are hereby incorporated by reference.
U.S. Pat. App. No. 20050125197 published by Duron, et al., on Jun. 9, 2005, discloses a system and method for detecting and monitoring structural damages which are irreversible and which lead to inevitable collapse of a building or location. The system includes at least one accelerometer that is housed in a device that is mounted on an exterior surface outside the burn area, and within the reach of the rescue worker. The device communicates with a remote display that provides visual and/or audible signals to indicate imminent collapse at the location. Additionally, the system includes collapse detecting analysis processes for determining the likelihood of collapse. The disclosures of this patent application are hereby incorporated by reference.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,472,320 issued to Berndlmaier, et al., on Dec. 30, 2008, discloses a method and apparatus for autonomously self-monitoring and self-adjusting the operation of an integrated circuit device throughout the integrated circuit device's useful life. The invention periodically performs performance self-testing on the integrated circuit device throughout the integrated circuit device's useful life. The invention also evaluates whether results from the self-testing are within acceptable limits and self-adjusts parameters of the integrated circuit device until the results from the self-testing are within the acceptable limits. The disclosures of this patent are hereby incorporated by reference.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,437,644 issued to Ginggen, et al., on Oct. 14, 2008, discloses a transcutaneous energy transfer (TET) system that performs automatic, periodic self-testing functionality of multiple components of the implantable medical device, preferably all components whose malfunction could negatively impact the health of the patient, without triggering from an external device. Simultaneous self-testing of multiple components, preferably all components whose malfunction could negatively impact the health of the patient, on an automatic, periodic basis minimizes energy consumption. The disclosures of this patent are hereby incorporated by reference.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,320,030 issued to Brown on Jan. 15, 2008, discloses a remote health monitoring apparatus using scripted communications, e.g., generating a script program from a set of queries. The script program is executable by a remote apparatus that displays information and/or a set of queries to the individual through a user interface. Responses to the queries that are entered through the user interface together with individual identification information are sent from the remote apparatus to the server system across a communication network. The server system also includes an automated answering service for providing a series of questions from a stored set of questions for an individual at the remote apparatus to respond to, storing responses to each provided question in the series of questions and providing a service based on the individual's response to the questions. The disclosures of this patent are hereby incorporated by reference.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,319,405 issued to Hofbeck, et al., on Jan. 15, 2008, discloses a method for self-diagnosis of a system, in particular for seat occupancy detection in an automotive vehicle, in order to control deployment of an airbag in the event of an accident, for example as a function of the corresponding seat occupancy. The disclosures of this patent are hereby incorporated by reference.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,214,939 issued to Wong, et al., on May 8, 2007, discloses a fire detector and method for generating an alarm signal in response to a fire that uses an NDIR carbon dioxide sensor to generate an alarm signal when a signal processor receives the detector signal and a pre-selected criterion is met that is indicative of the onset of a fire based upon an analysis of the detector signal using a detection algorithm that relies upon a trending pattern of the detector signal, such as recognizing a substantial drop in the detector signal strength. The disclosures of this patent are hereby incorporated by reference.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,530,049 issued to Abramovici, et. al. on Mar. 2, 2003, discloses a method of fault tolerant operation of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) utilizing incremental reconfiguration during normal on-line operation includes configuring an FPGA into initial self-testing areas and a working area. Within the self-testing areas, programmable logic blocks (PLBs) of the FPGA are tested for faults. Upon the detection of one or more faults within the PLBs, the faulty PLBs are isolated and their modes of operation exhaustively tested. Partially faulty PLBs are allowed to continue operation in a diminished capacity as long as the faulty modes of operation do not prevent the PLBs from performing non-faulty system functions. After testing the programmable logic blocks in the initial self-testing areas, the FPGA is reconfigured such that a portion of the working area becomes a subsequent self-testing area and at least a portion of the initial self-testing area replaces that portion of the working area. In other words, the self-testing area roves around the FPGA repeating the steps of testing and reconfiguring until the entire FPGA has undergone testing, or continuously. The disclosures of this patent are hereby incorporated by reference.
While many of the systems in the prior art cleverly and impressively attempt to handle failures or alert people to dangers, such systems ultimately depend on the accuracy of the function of their electronic devices, with or without redundant electronics to provide operational fault tolerance (e.g., Triple Module Redundancy (TMR), and equivalent redundant electronic systems). Furthermore, any electronic device is more likely to fail after the Mean-Time-To-Failure (MTTF) of the electronic device has been reached, or when an unusual event damages the electronic device itself.
Furthermore, even electronic devices with sophisticated redundancy such as TMR will become error prone when the probability of failure of one of the triple modules becomes greater than 0.5. Then the probability of failure for at least two out of the three modules will become greater than 0.5. In other words, the redundancy will amplify the probability of a false output when each component becomes more likely to be operating incorrectly. This is very critical for human safety, because then a system, even a redundant system, will have a significant likelihood of incorrectly detecting failure when there is actually no failure (i.e., a false positive), or incorrectly missing failure when there is a real failure (i.e., a false negative). Furthermore, such systems may be called upon in an emergency to warn or save a person during the occurrence of a potentially dangerous event (e.g., a structural failure, fire, some type of violence, poisoning, collision, explosion, or other environmental compressions or decompressions, avalanche, lightning, hurricane, tornado, tsunami, flooding, earthquake, volcanic eruption, medical emergency, or any other dangerous event). What is needed is a system that increases the reliability of such critical electronic devices to overcome these problems with a screening and selective testing approach to increase the probability of providing a correct output even when an electronic device, with or without redundancy, is failing to provide a correct output.